Clazh

Post Wordpress To Twitter Automatically, With Short URLs, No Plugin Required

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:09:45 +0000

I been trying to cut down on the number of Plugins used. Firstly to make maintained easier, secondly to simplify and reduce to the bare minimum without using Plugins, thirdly to hone up my WordPress skills. The latest plugin I got rid of was the WP to Twitter Plugin. Initially I started off trying to modify how I wanted it to work. Basically I wanted to cut off Bit.ly as a URL shortner and use my own blog as a URL shortner to send people directly to my site and keep the traffic on my site without the need for a middle man. I figured this out after I saw how Amit Aggarwal was tweeting his links to his site.

Short URLs in WordPress without Bit.ly or URL Shortners

We all know that WordPress generates long Permalinks for your site, it automatically converts your titles into those long URLs called permalinks that you see. Example http://www.clazh.com/this_is_some_random_post, If you switch off Permalinks in WordPress you’ll see that links to your posts will be of the form http://www.clazh.com/?p=401 if you look at it you’ll notice the last bit has a number attached to it, each post has a unique ID associated to it. The trick is to make use of this ID to and create a URL for our posts, so when people click on this shortned link they’ll be automatically taken to the Permalink associated with that post its as simple as that.

A Simple WordPress To Twitter Function.

First we’ll write a really simple function that uses CURL to post to the Twitter API. Just copy paste it into your functions.php file in your WordPress theme directory. In case you don’t see the file in yours themes folder just create one and paste the code inside it. To check if CURL is enabled on your server you can paste this function into a blank PHP file and call the function like this twitterUpdate("some random post", "http://clazh.com", true); with some random inputs. Make sure you uncomment the last few lines where it says to uncomment to test for CURL support.

Note: In the rare case your host does not support CURL you can always make use of fsockopen for PHP 4 or the much easier stream_context_creat for PHP5

function twitterUpdate($postTitle, $postLink, $isNew)
{
	// Enter Your Twitter ID Here
	$username = 'Twitter_ID';
	// Enter Your Twitter Password Here
	$password = 'Password';

	// Check if New or Updated Post
	if($isNew)
		$postTitle = 'New Post: ' . $postTitle;
	else
		$postTitle = 'Updated Post: ' . $postTitle;

	// Calculate Twitter Msg and keep it under 140 Chars
        if(strlen ($postTitle) > (140 - strlen ($postLink)))
		$postTitle 		= substr_replace($postTitle, '...', (140 - 3 - strlen ($postLink)));

	$message = $postTitle . $postLink;

	// The twitter API address
	$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';
	$curl_handle = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
	$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
	curl_close($curl_handle);

	// Uncomment the lines below to check if
	// CURL is enabled on your Web Server
	// check for success or failure
	/*
	if (empty($buffer))
		echo 'message';
	else
		echo 'success';
	*/
}

WordPress Function that Triggers Post To Twitter

Next we’ll write a simple wordpress function that triggers whenever you update or publish a post, we will also added a custom metadata to the post check if its a new or old post. Copy paste this code below the twitterUpdate function in your functions.php themes file.

function postToTwitter($post_ID)
{
	// Create your Short URL replace with your blog url
	$postLink = ' http://clazh.com/?p=' . $post_ID;
	// Get the Post Object
	$get_post_info 	= get_post( $post_ID );
	// Get the Post Title
	$postTitle = $get_post_info->post_title;

	// Check if Custom Metadata is there
	// Using _postedtoTwitter hides it from admin UI
	// Change to postedtoTwitter everywhere if you want to see it
	$alreadyPosted = get_post_meta($post_ID, '_postedtoTwitter', true);

	if($alreadyPosted != 'true')
	{
		// Create Custom meta data and set it to true
		add_post_meta($post_ID, '_postedtoTwitter', 'true', true);
		twitterUpdate($postTitle, $postLink, true);
	}
	// Remove the Comment and Uncomment this out
	// if You want to tweet everytime you Update a Post
	/*
	else
	{
		twitterUpdate($postTitle, $postLink, false);
	}
	*/
}

// Post to twitter when you publish or update a post
add_action('publish_post', 'postToTwitter');

So thats about it, just paste these two blocks of code into your functions.php and change the required parameter, you can play around with the code and modify it to change the message being posted to twitter.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Featured, Tutorial, Web-Design, Wordpress Tags:

Microsoft We Screwed Up Windows Mobile, iPhone Competitor Silverlight Mobile 2010

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:51:44 +0000

I just returned from the round table discussion Microsoft MVPs and MVP Alumni had with S. Somasegar the Senior Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, at the Sheraton Hotel in Chennai. I was the first person to land there and the only one dressed up casually in a T-Shirt and Jeans not surprising since most of the MVPs had regular jobs or worked as developers for companies.

Its very rare to see an executive of such high level come down to meet with developers and mix and mingle with them. Its people like Somasegar who connect and engage with the community that increases the appeal Microsoft has as a Company and separates them from Apple or Google. A down to earth person he candidly answers all the questions that were fired at him.

He began by explaining Microsoft’s Vision and how they always plan and develop things which would be relevant 5 years down the line, the next version of .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, new features introduced the completely redesigned UI based on WPF for the IDE. Most of the discussion centered around .NET and the developer tools. But Missing from the whole talk was Windows Mobile. While I been a .NET developer for 3 years before I quit to become a freelancer, I was more interested in what Microsoft was doing with Silverlight and its Mobile Platform, and how they were looking to compete with the iPhone OS and Android Platform.

Yes We Screwed up with Windows Mobile

I pointed out Windows Mobile and the lack of innovation and stagnation with regards to features, User Experience, Design and interface his answer was extremely candid and frank. “Yes we screwed up Windows Mobile, and let it stagnant. In fact you are being very polite in pointing this out.” He went to say how the initial vision of Windows Mobile had been long term and well planned but along the way the lost the game.

Microsoft Secret Plans For Windows Mobile, Silverlight for Mobile

While he was very mum and secretive about what Microsoft had planned for Windows Mobile, he did let out that a few things about what Microsoft was doing for the mobile platform, they had revamped the whole Windows mobile team and rebooted the process similar to what they had done with Windows Longhorn. I see it more like a comparison of what happened with Windows Vista Vs Windows 7.

Some of the Key Points he made were.

Rebooted Windows mobile Strategy.
Brand New Windows Mobile Team
Microsoft is laying its bet on SilverLight
Silverlight for mobile will be the competitor for iPhone and Andriod.
Silverlight for Mobile will be announced at MIX 2010

Things Microsoft got wrong

They are too late in the game.
They are taking too long to come out with a competing product and keeping with the trends.
Billions spent on R&D hard to believe nothing concrete on the Mobile front has come out yet
Clear Disconnect between Microsoft Design team and products. Do they even have a Design R&D team?

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Software, Technology Tags: iPhone, Microsoft, Mobile, Software, Web-Development

10 Free Web Design Icons For Download, Used On This Web Site

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:32:28 +0000

I thought I would review and showcase some of the beautiful Icons that I made use of while designing this web site. I redesigned the site a week back and have made extensive use of various icons across the site. All the icons featured on this site are freely available for download and can be used for both commercial and personal use. Some of the icon designers require you to link back to their blog or web site. Using icons while designing your web site, blog or web application not only helps to increase the usability of the user interface by providing visual cues to the user, but also makes your design look more pleasing in terms of the look and feel. Its important that the Icons you use convey the right visual cue to the user. The iPhone is a great example of an application which makes extensive use of Icons. Computer users are very familiar with the use of icons especially the ones that they come across everyday in their day to day use. With the onslaught of so many social networking sites, each brand is now associated with their own colours, logos and icons. Some common examples are Apple, Windows, and Google.

Here are 9 + 1 Icon sets and collections that I used on this site and 1 bonus icon collection that I contemplated using for the design.

Social Network Icon Pack

Social Network Icon Pack By Komodo Media. These icons are really quite popular and have become common place. Designed by the awesome Rogie King. It contain a extensive list of icons in 16px and 32px for the most popular social networking sites on the internet. These 16px Icons are really crisp and sharp.

Download the Social Network Icon pack

The Oxygen icon theme

An Open Source Icon Them, the Oxygen icon theme was initially started by David Vignoni, then a number of other designer joined in to create an Icon Theme for the KDE Desktop. The icons are a collection of different works from different designer. While there is no official download package you can download it from the Ubuntu repository.

Download the Oxgen Icon Them Note: Download the Deb Package and use 7-zip to unzip and extract the contents.

iPhone style sidebar icons

These pretty Icons were created by Susumu Yoshida. I found it while hunting around for 16px Icons.

Download the iPhone Style Sidebar Icons

The Crystal icon theme

Another Open source Icon theme created by Everaldo and a list of few other designers designed exclusively for Linux. These icons are very Popular and have been ported to Windows and the Mac too.

Download the Crystal icon theme

Danish Royalty Free Icons

Create by the famous now retired Icon designer, Jonas Rask of Denmark, these are a list of Icons designed exclusively for the Web and for use in web applications.

Download Danish Royalty Free Icons

Web Injection Icons

Web Injection Icons Designed by Jonatan Castro from Galicia, Spain. A small collections of web icons.

Download the Web Injection Icons

Toolbar Icons Starter Kit

A small set of web Toolbar Icons, created by Kombine, contains about 45 Icons in the set.

Download the Toolbar Icons Starter Kit

Glyphish Icons for iPhone Applications

A collection of 130 icons for iPhone applications. Created by Joseph Wain. Has been used in a large number of popular iPhone Applications.

Download the Glyphish Icons for iPhone Applications

DelliPack 1 & 2 Icons

A small set of generic web Icons created by Dellustrations.

Download the Dellipack 1 & 2 Icons

MinIcons Set

Though I didn’t use any of these Icons to round of the number to 10 I included MinIcons Set by Asher Abbasi.

Download the MinIcons Set

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Downloads, Featured, Web-Design Tags: Downloads, Free, Icons, UX, Web-Design, Web-Development

Get 6 Paid Mac OS X Applications For Free

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:13:18 +0000

Hurry up MacHeist is currently giving away 6 paid applications worth more than $ 175 for free. Just head to the homepage and signup. They will unlocked and give the serial keys to everyone when they reach 500,000 participants.

ShoveBox

Price: $25

Catch all the little scraps of information that you can’t immediately act on, but don’t want to forget. ShoveBox sits up in your menu bar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more.
ShoveBox makes it very simple to enter stuff, just drag it in from any app or use the handy QuickJot feature to type in notes, etc.

WriteRoom

Price: $25

WriteRoom is a simple, but powerful app that provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. WriteRoom does one main thing and does it incredibly well: It’s all about writing.

Twitterrific

Price: $15

Twitterrific is an exquisite app that enables you to make the most out of your Twitter experience. It has a clean user interface that’s designed to take up little of your precious desktop space.
Millions of people have discovered how much fun Twitter can be. Now you can make it an even more enjoyable experience with one of the pioneer Twitter apps. Twitterrific is packed with features, so that you’ll feel like you’re in total control over everything you do on Twitter.

TinyGrab

Price: $14

TinyGrab is a simple, powerful app that enables you to quickly share screenshots of everything on your Mac.
Simply press Command, Shift, and 4, then select the area on your screen that you’d like to grab. Or tap the spacebar to select a whole window to grab. Then TinyGrab quickly uploads the screenshot and puts the URL for it on your Clipboard so you can easily share it via email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Hordes of Orcs

Price: $25

Hordes of Orcs is a Tower Defense strategy game where you build walls and towers to defend your village from orcs gone rogue.
There are several different towers, each with it’s own unique abilities. Build Arrow Towers, Radiation Towers, Fire Towers, and more to keep your village safe from the deadly clutches of green meanies.

Mariner Write

Price: $50

Mariner Write is a fast, streamlined word processor that’s useful for everyone… professional writers, educators, students, casual computer users, and everyone in-between. It has a simple, elegant user interface so that you can create beautiful documents the very first time you start using it.
This is the word processor with perfect balance of features. Too many word processors bog you down with “kitchen sink syndrome”, while others skimp on important features. Not Mariner Write… you get all the tools you need to do the job, without any feature-bloat.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Apple, Software Tags: Apple MacOSX Software Free Download

Facebook Chat, Google Gtalk Intergration Coming Soon

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:48:44 +0000

A year back Facebook had announced that they were building a XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. Which is the same protocol that Google has used to build Google Gtalk, Google’s popular Instant messaging service. Process One’s bot IMTrends has detected that Facebook has implemented the Jabber/XMPP Protocol.

So what is XMPP? XMPP formerly called Jabber, is a messaging protocol based on XML. The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data. Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, it is an open system where anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own XMPP server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many clients are also free and open source software.

This is big new this means you’ll be able to chat with Gmail and Google users. This means Google users will be able to interact with Facebook users using the same IM Chat clients. Which means you’ll be soon able to use Facebook chat on any of your favorite instant messaging desktop or web based clients.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Google, Internet Tags: Google, Internet, Social-Networks

Reborn, Resurrected, Relaunched, Reloaded, Redesigned

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:15:48 +0000

So here we are at last, more than a year has gone by since I left this blog in limbo. To kick-start my blogging again I decided to redesign and re-brand the blog. As I mentioned in my previous post I am currently working as a freelance Web/UI designer for the last 10 months or so. So after an year and a half of procrastination, I present you the all new Clazh Technology and Design. Expect me start blogging regularly from now on. I am also advertising my skills as a web designer, very soon I will be selling a some really cool WordPress themes and templates so watch out. A lot of exciting things have happened in the last one year, I hope to keep that momentum going.

About the new design.

Well this is the longest time I have ever taken to design something, the design went through more than 40 revisions, it was partly my fault since kept putting it in the back burner and every time I brought it up to work on I would change something. I happy with the overall look and design. I know its not as colorful as my last one. The pink color in my last design became a running joke among my friends. Currently the site is still in beta.

Running on the latest and best WordPress 2.8.
Very Lightweight.
Uses only one image for the whole site, CSS Sprites.
All Javascript are hosted on External CDN
New featured content slider on the homepage.
New community submitted articles.

Please do provide some feedback, will really appreciate it. If something is broken get in touch with me using the contact form. Lots more new stuff coming up on the site just keep a watch.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Web-Design Tags: Blogging, Web-Design, Wordpress

Back from the dead

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:23:49 +0000

Its going to be almost a year since I have blogged. Its time to get back to blogging and revive this blog again. Lot of things have been happening on my side. 2008 was one the best and worst year of my life, personally and career wise. A few things I would like to highlight are.

I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Most Valuable Professional.
I quit my IT Job at the software company I was working at.
I switched to a Mac, I brought a mac book pro 15′.
I been backpacking and traveling. Bhutan, Dubai, Goa, Kodaikanal etc.
I been doing volunteer work here and there.

So whats next.

Start blogging again.
Revamp the site and design.
Start Freelancing as a web designer and developer.
Lots more backpacking and traveling.

If you’ve been a long time reader, my apologies for the neglect. Do let me know what you like to see on this blog, and how we can improve it further.

How To Remove SpyWare, AdWare Clean and Fix Windows

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:08:56 +0000

Recently my company gave me a laptop to use for work. It was riddled with SpyWare and AdWare. The instant I fired up IE the Virus and SpyWare would trigger up and redirect me to some random ad laden web page requesting me to download even more SpyWare. Since reinstalling the OS was not an option I had to clean up the system on my own somehow. I am listing a bunch of software that you’ll need before we proceed.

Update Window

The first step is to make sure your windows is updated with the latest security patches and fixes. If you are running Windows XP make sure you have installed Service Pack 2. Once you are done installing service pack 2 you should run Windows update and get the latest patches. Another alternative is to use AutoPatcher this is a utility which will download all the required patches and security fixes from Microsoft and store it in a folder on your system which you can later reuse to apply to other computers that you need to update.

Run A Full Scan Using AntiVirus and AntiSpyware Softwares.

There are a number of free AntiVirus software I have for now listed two of them. Virus can do all sorts of weird things to your computer. For example on my laptop the virus disabled the “View Hidden Files” option, even though I checked the option it would reset it back, it also set a number of scheduled tasks in my Task Scheduler to call a number of different copies of the Virus. Run a full scan of the system. Next run a Anti-SpyWare software I highly recommend AdAware.

Clean Up Your Start Up Items.

Most SpyWare and Virus configure your start up items to run the Virus when you boot up or log into your system. Use the MsConfig tool in windows to check which items are being loaded at start up. If you see any suspicious looking entries uncheck them also identify which file is being called and manually delete it. Sometime this might not work like in my case I had to log into widows using safe mode (When Windows is booting up press F8 you will see an option to load windows under safe mode) and delete the offending file. Use the process explorer tool to see if the processing running on your system are all legitimate. Also use AutoRuns to delete any entries that look suspicious especially DLL that are unsigned and have random looking names.

Clean Up And Optimise Your System.

There are a number of tools that can clean your system of unwanted and unused temporary files and registry entries. One of the best tools that I have found so far is CCleaner which provides a number of advanced options to clean up your system. Try to keep the number of items that start up when you boot the system to a minimum.

Prevention Is Better Than Cure.

Better safe than sorry. Ditch IE period and get FireFox. Run an Anti-Virus software and do a full scan periodically. Also do a full Anti-SpyWare scan periodically. Also scan external drives like thumb drives and external hard disk when you connect it to the computer.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Featured, Technology, Tutorial Tags: Anti-Virus, How To, Repair, SpyWare

Notable Free Premium WordPress Themes

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:59:03 +0000

Time for showcasing a few notable Free Premium Quality WordPress Themes that caught my eye. With a little a bit of creativity and extra work you could modify these themes to get yourself a free high quality theme.

LeoPress Leopard Inspired WordPress Theme

LeoPress is a free three column WordPress. The design is inspired by Mac OSX Leopard.

Download Link: Here

Preview: Here

Lemon Twist

A green coloured two column WordPress theme from farfromfearless. Theme was developed for the authors own site and later release to the public to download. The panels in the side block are collapsible, it also has a large footer in the front page to showcase your flickr images and latest posts.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Probama WordPress Theme

A politically inspired theme supporting Barack Obama. The home page is a two column WordPress theme with a large footer, for single posts and pages the layout switches to a single column layout. The menu supports sub pages and are shown as drop down lists.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Neoclassical Three Column WordPress Theme

This a clean Three column WordPress theme with great typography.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Massive Mobile

If you want to display your site or blog in a more user friendly way on the iPhone or PSP you can make use of this free theme.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design

CoolWater Two Column Free WordPress Theme

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:32:03 +0000

This is another beautiful free CSS XHTML web template by Styleshout that I really liked and decided to convert into a WordPress Template. The WordPress theme design is called CoolWater. As the name suggests this theme is really clean and has a bright punchy look and feel. The Theme is a two column theme and has support for widgets and is supported for wordpress 2.3 and above. The template is released under a Creative Commons license, Please leave the original designers link intact.

Demo: Click Here to look at the demo.

Please link to this page do not link to the download link directly.

[download#6#image]

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design